Energy Live Future Speakers

Speakers

Gab Barbaro

Gab is responsible for British Gas Business (BGB), the division serving around 400,000 businesses across more than 700,000 locations with energy supplies and services.

BGB helps customers manage their energy, providing gas and electricity as well as a full range of energy efficiency services. Through Centrica’s Distributed Energy & Power business, BGB also provides distributed energy solutions from energy analytics to large-scale installations such as energy storage and combined heat and power (CHP) in the UK.

Gab joined British Gas’ parent company, Centrica, in 2009 as Head of Group Strategy. In 2012 he was appointed Managing Director of Business Services. Previously, Gab spent 10 years working in the energy industry in the UK and globally, as a strategy expert for Boston Consulting Group and Accenture.

Stephen Church

Partner, EY

Stephen leads the UK and Ireland Energy and Assets market for EY Advisory, supporting clients in solving complex problems such as disruptive technologies, smart metering, regulatory change and capital program delivery. His specialism is shaping, directing and leading large businesses through big transformations in the energy and asset intensive industry sectors.

Robert Llewylln

Robert is an actor, comedian, presenter and writer, perhaps best known for his role as Kryten in the hit BBC Comedy series Red Dwarf and as co-presenter of Channel 4’s Scrapheap Challenge.

His home grown internet video series Carpool aired online and on Dave before returning to its online roots after receiving sponsorship from Toyota GB. He also curates Fully Charged, another online series which discusses renewable energy issues and reviews electric cars.

Robert’s other presenting roles include How Do They Do It? (Channel 4), Hollywood Science (Channel 5), God’s Millions (Reef Television), The Gadget Show (North One Television) and Top Trumps (History Channel).

Robert joined the cast of Red Dwarf in 1989 and has continued in the role until 2016’s eleventh series. He was also the only original British cast member to participate in the American version. His other TV and film credits include The Cornerhouse (Channel 4), M.I.High (BBC) and Mirrormask.

Robert is also the author; he has written biographies, screenplays and four novels.

Dan Lewis

Dan Lewis is Senior Energy Adviser to the Institute of Directors,Chief Executive of the Economic Policy Centre – a think tank hub of the UK economics community and Chief Executive of Future Energy Strategies, an energy events and energy data reporting company which researches the energy industry of tomorrow. He also has a passion for big data queries and runs two websites www.UKCrimeStats – the leading independent crime and property price data platform and www.eutariffs.com – a comprehensive website of all EU import tariffs.

Prior to September 2009, Dan was for six years Research Director of the Economic Research Council and was also the founder of AEI www.altenergyinvestor.org – the global resource bank for the Alternative Energy Investor (in existence from 2006-2009), sponsored during that period by Guinness Atkinson Asset Management.

On behalf of the Institute of Directors and his other affiliations, he contributes regularly to the press and media on energy and space matters. He is the author of Space: Britain’s New Infrastructure Frontier (2012 for the IoD) and sat on the British government’s (2012-2014) Spaceplane Regulation Workshop process, for developing human commercial spaceflight and launch site regulation for the UK. He is an unashamed technological optimist and looks forward to the day when off-Earth GDP exceeds that of our home planet.

Alex Montgomery

Alex Montgomery AKA Monty has spent more than 18 years in the technology industry, the last 7 of which have been at Microsoft in a number of product, sales and strategy roles. He has a background in business applications and has a passion for helping customers drive transformational outcomes through the use of technology. In his current role, Monty holds accountability for product strategy across Azure IoT and Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence services including amongst others Cognitive services, Machine Learning and Azure Bot Framework. A seasoned public speaker, Monty excels at bringing together complex propositions and simplifying them for business and technical audiences, underlining value outcomes for customers of all sizes and industries.

Barrie Caird

Barrie is the Operations Manager for Connections & Metering and has worked for British Gas for 17 years. His experience covers resource planning, project management, transactional finance and field operations. Barrie is the business services expert for products and processes.

Paul Danby

Paul Danby is the Head of Commercial for the I&C Energy team within British Gas. He re-joined British Gas in November 2012 having also worked for the company between 2001 and 2007. He has worked in the B2B energy market for 20 years, starting out at Yorkshire Electricity Group and, more recently, as part of the senior management team at GDF SUEZ Energy UK (now ENGIE).

David Rizzo

David has worked for British Gas for 21 years and in I&C for the last 18 years. He specialises in the TPI sector and has worked solely with them for the last 6 years. Knowledgeable in energy services and bundled solutions, David’s primary focus is working across the business to develop the right products at the right price and meeting the unique needs of each large energy user.

Robert Ingoldby

Robert is an expert in electricity demand forecasting and pricing. Robert has 17 years experience in the energy industry with EDF Energy and Centrica. He was electricity pricing manager for large business customers at EDF Energy, before joining Centrica to manage the power hedging and forecasting team. Robert is responsible for forecasting the demand for Centrica’s electricity business customers.

Mark Linke

With more than 15 years energy market experience at Centrica., Mark is currently the Gas Forecasting and Hedging Manager for British Gas Business. Responsible for optimising the commodity risk of the SME and I&C portfolio, Mark helps our larger customers manage their energy purchasing strategies. Mark also has a wealth of experience in trading, asset optimisation, risk management and residential demand forecasting.

Ian Shaylor

Ian is an expert in helping business customers gain insight from data. Smart meters mean that for the first time the Big Data industry trend is not only relevant to suppliers, but also customers. Ian’s team provide multiple ways for customers (large and small) to engage with their data to understand their consumption so they can choose any changes to their energy use that might suit them and save them money. Ian has 15 years experience in advanced data insights and 5 years in energy, both upstream generation and customer consumption.

Lee Kirton

Lee has worked within the energy industry for more than 12 years and has a wealth of experience across commercial energy supply contracts, energy pricing, commercial aspects, sales and customer service.

Lee heads up customer service for our Major accounts, looking after all of our largest revenue customers. His customer-centric approach and his breadth of knowledge and experience within the industry enables him to assess the specific requirements of our customers, ensuring we deliver a customer service to be proud of.

Mike Chessum

Mike joined the British Gas Energy Services group in 2009 when the company he part owned – Energy and Building Management Solutions – was acquired by British Gas. He started the Energy Performance Contracting (EPC) business for British Gas in 2011 and was made Head of Energy Construction Services in 2014. In 2015, Mike took over as Director of I&C Energy and Services Sales. He has over 25 years’ experience in the I&C Energy Services Business, and considerable experience of developing solutions that reduce carbon emissions and energy costs across a variety of commercial sectors.

Dylan Crompton

Dylan leads the team responsible for working in partnership with key customers to develop and implement an effective energy strategy.

Dylan and his team of Customer Solutions Managers are responsible for the development of bespoke energy solutions, integrating commodity procurement strategies with demand reduction, on-site generation and flexible load management.

With 21 years’ experience in energy management, Dylan has a proven track record of delivering energy cost reduction programmes in both the public and private sector.

George Moran

George is an expert in regulation and policy. George has 17 years experience in the energy industry with Central Networks (Electricity Distribution) and Centrica. A specialist in the regulated sector, with Central Networks George was responsible for setting Distribution charges in the East and West Midlands regions, and with Centrica is responsible for forecasting regulated charges.

Omer Benyamini

Omer is an expert in Panoramic Power, our unique system of wireless sensors and cloud-based analytics giving you real time device-level insight. Omer has over 3 years’ experience as a solutions consultant at Panoramic Power, currently managing all existing customers of Panoramic Power in the UK, and helping Centrica’s customers use the system to its full potential. He has specific expertise with the system deployment and configuration, energy insights and advanced BI capabilities.

Christos Keramisanos

Christos Keramisanos holds an MEng degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering majoring in Power Systems and an MSc degree in Renewable Energy and Clean Technology. He has been working on energy markets research projects in academia and various solar PV and C&I projects in Greece.

Christos joined UK Power Networks in 2014. He has worked on all of UKPN’s major innovation projects, including the Flexible Plug & Play, Flexible Urban Networks LV, Smart urban low voltage networks and Smarter Network Storage. Since November 2015 he has focused on developing Energy Storage within UK Power Networks Services, the Commercial division of UK Power Networks. Christos is a member of the IET.

Dr. Ruzanna Chitchyan

Dr. Ruzanna Chitchyan is a lecturer in Software Engineering at the Department of Informatics, University of Leicester, where she leads the Software Intensive Systems Engineering theme. She researches on engineering software that supports sustainable living and novel software-enabled utilities infrastructures. She focuses on alternative models of energy/service provision to households, new energy trading models, and energy system decentralisation

Rick Greenough

Rick Greenough is a Professor of Energy Systems and the Head of Research at the Institute of Energy and Sustainable Development (IESD) at De Montfort University. He is also acting Head of the School of Engineering and Sustainable Development. His previous academic positions were at Bolton Institute and Cranfield University, where he gained his PhD in Advanced Manufacturing. Before he became an academic, Rick was a manufacturing engineer at British Aerospace where he worked in robotics and carbon composite manufacturing technology.

Rick has research interests in the role of energy systems in low carbon buildings, including domestic buildings and factories. He has secured £1.8M of funding to support his research and is currently leading three research projects featuring the development and demonstration of novel energy systems. The first of these explores the social and technical aspects of an energy system featuring local generation, storage and management of electrical demand for a community of domestic users. The second project involves the modelling and demonstration of renewable energy and the re-use of waste energy in three different industries within Europe, and the third will demonstrate the application of novel hybrid heat pump, borehole heat exchanger and borehole drilling process for a ‘hard to heat’ home in Leicester. He recently completed a project that investigated the use of time-shifting to reduce the energy and CO2 emissions associated with air conditioning systems in the retail sector. Rick runs an energy laboratory that is used for teaching, research and demonstration of the results of IESD’s energy research.

Rick is the chair of the East Midlands branch of the Energy Institute, he has spoken about and written on ‘fracking’ in the Leicester media and has published over 90 peer-reviewed articles.